Sukkat Shalom Reform Synagogue

Purim is today a time of great celebration and fun but lying below the surface is a story that reflects a deeper reality. This is the reality of bigotry, fanaticism and hatred that infects every people and every land and whose consequences are inevitably death and destruction. Within living memory we have seen the Shoah as well as horrendous massacres in Cambodia and Rwanda. In the Soviet Union, Stalin condemned an estimated 24 million people to death by starvation in order to establish farming communes and in China Mao Tse-tung killed over 75 million people in his attempt to reshape the country to meet his image of socialism. Fanaticism has many faces and subtle as well as obvious effects. As in the case of Hamas and the Islamic Brotherhood it results in indifference to the suffering of their own people and in calls for genocide and world conquest. In the case of Yisrael Beitenu the effect is the determination to press one’s own claims while ignoring the rights and claims of others. Religious fundamentalists try to censor and ban any form of knowledge or behaviour with which they disagree while atheistic scientist fanatics attempt to bar and exclude fellow scientists who disagree from positions of authority or influence. Like their mirror image fundamentalists they seek to prevent any voices but their own from being heard. We must combat fanaticism in whatever form. But how can we do this?

First we as individuals and a community must confront and deal with our own proclivities in this direction. There is none among us who does not have a position or view that we hold so strongly that we can not conceive of the possibility of being wrong. Often this blocks out our willingness and ability to listen to those who disagree. Only when we truly listen to those who hold different views can we acknowledge that we do not possess the whole truth and that in some instances even contradictory positions can both be true.

Second we must confront fanaticism with words. To fail to speak out against those who would impose extremism upon others is to be complicit with them. To recognise other values is not equivalent to accepting them. We as Jews and as members of a broader democratic society have a duty to actively speak out and defend our rights and the rights of all of our neighbours whatever their backgrounds. We are the heirs to a great tradition but this is not an automatic inheritance. Our freedoms rest on our willingness and ability to defend them.

Finally and most painfully we must be ready to defend ourselves through action against those who would transfer their fanaticism from words to deeds. If the history of our times teaches us anything it is that one can not shut one’s eyes and hope that fanaticism will just go away because we want it to, nor that evil will cease if we ignore it and pretend that it doesn’t exist. Had Hitler been resisted in the Rhineland or Czechoslovakia there may have been hundreds, even thousands killed, no doubt many innocent civilians among them. There would have been much criticism of the fighting and the deaths. The world would have no doubt condemned Britain and France for seeming to risk throwing the world back into the horrors of war to defend a deeply flawed Versailles treaty. But perhaps the world would have been spared the even greater horrors of the Second World War and the incomprehensible evil that accompanied it. We can never be certain when we act with violence what the ramifications will be. We must always seek the path of peace. But we can not afford to delude ourselves that reason and words will always suffice.

The tragic truth is that we can be certain that violence whether justified or not will bring sorrow and hatred in its wake. Thus our duty to ourselves, to humanity and to God is to work as effectively as possible through peaceful means to prevent the need for self defence. The story of Purim ends with a victory that was a defeat. We survived not through the decrees of the government but by taking up arms. That we survived was the victory, the failure was the need to resort to arms in the first place.